ECE News Story

A new study by ECE and ISR researchers in the Society for Neuroscience’s Journal of Neuroscience shows that induced patterns of rapid changes in neural pathways and synapses in the brain closely reflect the time and frequency of the tasks being performed. The study extends the functional relevance of rapid task-related brain changes to perceiving and learning natural sounds such as vocalizations in animals and speech in humans.

Complex natural and environmental sounds, such as speech and music, convey information along both frequency and time. The way the brain represents such stimuli rapidly adapts when animals become actively engaged in discriminating them. The study examined the nature of these changes.